LAS VEGAS—There are people who do magic and then there are Penn and Teller.

The diametrically dissimilar duo who will bring their particular brand of madness to Casino Rama on Oct. 4 can’t be easily pigeonholed, even if you make those pigeons materialize out of a clichéd silk hat.

In the theatre at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino, which has been the duo’s Mission Central since 2001, the sold-out crowd includes corn-fed middle Americans, bourbon-glazed bubbas from the South, edgy California hipsters and heavy-lidded New Yorkers who would like you to think they’ve seen it all.

But they haven’t. Not unless they’ve worshipped at the shrine of Penn and Teller before.

“Aren’t they just magicians?” asked someone waiting outside the theatre, to which I wanted to respond, “They’re just magicians the way the Mona Lisa is just a painting.”

They don’t merely saw a woman in half, they show you how they did it and then fling a blood-curdling surprise at you. They do sleight-of-hand tricks that are pointed defences of the Bill of Rights and bring the American love for guns onto the stage in a finale that is as hilarious as it is heart-stopping.

No, they’re not just magicians. They’re gladiators of legerdemain whose specialty is a kind of intellectual Grand Guignol, and they’ve been doing it successfully for more than 30 years.

They ask to meet separately, Penn before the show and Teller afterwards. It makes sense, because Penn spends so much energy onstage you think he’d have to be carried off in an ambulance post-performance while Teller is a bundle of reserve who has volumes of unspoken words to share when it’s over.

Penn is Penn Jillette, 58 years old, Massachusetts-born and as big as Paul Bunyan. He wears his hair in a ponytail, sports a goatee and has a voice that sounds like he’s been gargling with gravel. But he’s a sweet, sweet man behind the gruff exterior.

“I don’t know why people like us,” he says, leaning back on a sofa. “We never really thought they would. Teller and I are the only people in show business who are more successful than they expected. You talk to Lady Gaga or Madonna or Howard Stern, they all think they should be doing a little bit better. You talk to Paul McCartney, he thinks The Beatles should have had a few more hit songs.

“Teller and I thought what we were doing with magic was going to be a couple of hundred people a night and we would have been happy with that. It’s turned out to be a lot more and, frankly, we’re thrilled.”

Penn initially set out to be a juggler and trained at Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College. In 1974 he was introduced to Teller and, together with a friend named Weir Chrisemer, they formed a group called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.

“I was the one in the group who hated magic,” scowls Penn. “I felt ripped off by psychics when I was younger. Kreskin, I hated him. I was a juggler and there could be nothing more straightforward than that.

“But when I met Teller, he said a sentence to me that seemed insane at the time. He said, ‘Magic is an intellectual art form’ and that changed everything for me.”

Penn was a convert and, like most true converts, he became a fanatic.

“One of the most powerful things in art is irony and one of the things you want the most in irony is for the visceral and the intellectual to collide as fast as they can. You’re on a roller-coaster where the visceral says, ‘My God, we’re going to die!’ and the intellectual says, ‘You know, if they killed people their insurance rates would be too high.’

“Magic is not the willing suspension of disbelief, it’s the unwilling suspension of disbelief. It looks like this, but it can’t possibly be this. Stephen Fry once said that he could relax at a Penn and Teller show because he knew it wouldn’t insult his intelligence.”

And it doesn’t. A complex routine set in an airport security body scanner gets a knife-sharp edge when Penn holds up a little metal card he carries that has the Bill of Rights printed on it, one of said rights prohibiting just the kind of searches done at airports these days. In a nice touch, you can purchase a similar card for a mere $3 after the show.

Penn is a libertarian (so is Teller, but Penn’s the vocal one). He’s also an atheist and he firmly believes the pendulum is swinging in his direction.

“I said to Trey Parker it’s very clear that religion is going away and atheism is going to survive, and he said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to wait 300 years.’”

When the show is over, Penn and Teller don’t hide. They go out to the lobby and greet their fans, every single one, posing for pictures, recognizing familiar faces, making jokes and behaving in the way you wish every entertainer treated the people who pay their salaries.

Hearing Teller speak at length is the real novelty of the evening. He never utters a word onstage and normally doesn’t speak that much offstage.

Raymond Joseph Teller is the elder of the duo at 65 and, when he does speak, it’s a witty, thoughtful and erudite man who appears.

When told that he was the person who brought Penn back to magic, he laughs, “I’m very grateful, but I hardly think I can claim the credit. Magic is a form that’s so strong that an audience will watch it even when it’s badly done.

“Even if a guy just pulls out a handkerchief, waves it around and a dove pops out, most people would call it acceptable magic and it would have been enough to put Penn off his food.”

Penn was happier explaining the message behind illusions, but Teller is happier with the art of the form, discussing how a certain sequence was finessed or what went into its evolution.

“There’s no template we stick to. Stanislavski once said that when you’re acting a play, the whole play never comes clear to you all at once. Certain bright moments are visible to you at once and so you concentrate on those, waiting for them to illuminate the rest.”

The Philadelphia-born Teller has a mischievous grin he often employs onstage, but his offstage presence radiates a deep but calm intellectual acuity. In the past, he’s co-directed a successful version of Macbeth and he’s currently designing the magic for a new production of The Tempest at the American Repertory Theatre, with a score by Tom Waits. Talk about strange bedfellows.

“I’m always involved in a multiplicity of projects, just like Penn,” he says. “It helps keep the mind sharp, but in the end, it’s what the two of us do onstage together that matters the most.

“We may make it seem droll, but it’s a very serious business.”

As Teller walks me through the empty corridors of the theatre, I think back to something Penn said.

“Just think about the moral implications of magic. If any so-called magicians ever had real magical powers, why would they waste them moving a car from one place to another? What about a cure for cancer? What about world hunger?

“We have no powers. We’re just lying to you. But lying is fascinating. Lying to your own tribe members is taboo in every culture. But with us, once you put a proscenium around it, it’s to be celebrated.”

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